Meet The Neighbors: The Verdin

One of the first birds I met in the yard was the verdin (Auriparus flaviceps). Verdins are permanent (non-migratory) residents of the lower southwest United States and northern Mexico. They are generally found in desert washes, where shrubby thorn trees such as acacias, mesquites and palo verdes create suitable nest sites. It seems that verdins are also adapting to living within our residential communities, as well.

Yards which provide enough forage often support a resident family group of verdins. For a verdin, forage would mostly consist of insects. Here's a picture I took of the male verdin hunting for insects off the desert willow flowers. Insectivorous birds such as verdins, flycathers and warblers can be encouraged to visit a yard by avoiding the use of chemical insecticides to kill insects. Don't worry if you see insects flying around your landscape plants. Leave it to Nature's Pest Removers - insect-eating birds - to take care of the situation! You'll have a less-toxic yard, plus you'll be rewarded with bright avian visitors who will add color to the trees and shrubs and will provide you with lyrical songs!

The photo to the left is the male verdin scolding me when I got too close to one of his nests. Verdins can be territorial. We even consider our resident verdin to be the "guard dog" of our yard! When predatory animals such as roadrunners, neighbors' cats, or the local Cooper's hawk enter our yard, we often hear the "alarm" or "scold" call from the verdin. Links to some sites where you can listen to verdin calls are here and here. Usually I can't get a clear sight of this active little bird, but he was so focused on me, he let me take this picture. The shot to the right is often what I end with after several attempts to photograph this active little guy.

The photo to the right is a desert willow with a verdin nest constructed within its branches. You can click on the photo to get a better impression of the architectural marvel these little birds create! The verdin couple in our yard are often busy making different nests. Verdins construct several conspicuous nests throughout our yard. Verdins are the only birds in the New World that are part of the pendulous tit Family, which construct bag-shaped nests that hang from trees. Although verdins don't create such complex nests, they do perform an impressive architectural feat - they weave together tightly enclosed globular nests perched among the branches of shrubby trees and cacti. The photo to the left shows the female participating in the nest building process. Here, she hangs upside-down from the nest as she weaves a twig into the structure.

Spring-time with the verdins is one of my favorite times of year because I get to watch them feed the babies. This is a photo of poppa verdin feeding his baby (perched on a palo verde tree).

Pollinator Pages: Landcaping for Pollinators

When my brother and I were young, he used say that he didn’t want to mow the lawn because he would rather encourage the growth of a Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystem instead. At the time, I rejected his idea and considered it to be a disguise for laziness (and an ecological impossibility, given that we lived in New Jersey!!). I actively lobbied to my mom that he continue to mow the grass (which he did).

Decades later, I’ve changed my mind. In fact, I’m encouraged, because his own children are adopting his lawn-less attitude and helping him make his garden grow even bigger!

My brother and I, like many people around the world, are changing our attitudes about yards. When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that emphasized “neat”: large, evenly mowed grass lawns, trimmed hedges, and absolutely NO WEEDS. I believe, in part, it was because many residents didn’t think they had the time. We were all busy suburbanites, leaving our homes to run off to work, school, sports activities and other social fun.

However, my attitude has shifted. Now, I consider my yard to be an integral part of my activities. Its how I relax, how I exercise and how I enjoy my life (as you read my blog, I think you’ll get a sense for that!). I’m now even working to make it a place where I get some of my organic food! As I shift my lifestyle to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices, I’ve also come to understand how taking time to garden in my yard helps the planet to flourish. In honor of National Pollinator Week (June 21-27), I’ve decided to share some photos of ways that we’ve landscaped our yard to encourage pollinators.

First - Why?? Why do we want pollinators in our yard?

So many reasons!! In fact, it took me years to get around to writing this blog entry just because I’m overwhelmed with trying to summarize all the ways that pollinators help me and all the reasons why I want to take action to help them…

… I realized I’d just have to start trying to get it all down, bit by bit. My “Pollinator Pages” series will be an ongoing effort to share my answers to this question.

I will start with my most-urgent reason for helping the pollinators >> because the birds, bees, moths, flies, bats, beetles, and all other critters that help plants to get pollinated NEED OUR HELP!!! In part, this is because humans have covered a lot of ground with our buildings, roads, parking lots, and …

… lawns. Yes, lawns. Grass. That stuff I rolled around on as a kid and thought was so harmless.

Grass is nice! Don’t get me wrong. I love a nice spot of greenery to lay down and watch the clouds! An open space for a picnic or a fun sports game is a great thing. However - we humans are beginning to reconsider our level of responsibility to our pollinator friends, and deciding to start giving them back some much-needed space (and flowers). Of course, you don’t need a yard to help pollinators flourish. The Pollinator Partnership has created some recommendations to help protect pollinators.

What are the top elements for a good pollinator-friendly yard? I’ve been looking through a number of links (such as this, this and this), and I think I’ve captured the essential elements: forage, reproduction, shelter and water.

Forage, a.k.a. flowers, are how pollinators eat. Well, mostly! Creating a pollinator-friendly garden takes a little bit of self-education and planning (and here). We plant a variety of flower types: with different sizes, shapes and colors. We also try to landscape so that something will be flowering throughout the year.

I have so many pretty pictures of the different types of flowers and pollinators in our yard, I’m just interspersing them throughout the entire page. It’s the only way I can get them all in here!!

Here’s a photo of fly that looks like a bee, but if you look at its antennae, you will see that it has the short stalks of a fly. This is called a flower fly. 

This photo of the sphinx moth was difficult to take because they come out at dusk, when my camera has trouble getting high resolution shots. This was the best I could get.

How do we landscape our yard to help pollinators shelter and reproduce? We landscape for this simply by planting a mixture of native trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals; and by keeping “rookery sites” open for our native bees. Native plants need fewer input from gardeners, including less water subsidies to keep them alive (which equals lower bills!). In addition, because native plants are adapted to their region, and aren’t as susceptible disease or pests in the area, we don’t need to spray them with unhealthy chemicals (another major no-no for creating a pollinator-friendly yard).

As many of you who follow this blog might know, watching our hummingbirds nest has been great fun! Here’s a photo of a Costa’s hummingbird on a palo verde tree, getting ready to feed her hungry chick.

We help our native bees reproduce by keeping patches of soil and sand bare, so they can develop their rookery sites. Once we notice an area in the yard that the bees use, we let each other know not to dig that section of soil or to cover it with any compost. Can you see the holes in the soil? I count 6 of them. This area has been used by bees every single spring that I’ve lived in this yard (which is now 7 years). Here’s a photo of a bee exiting one of the holes. They are VERY cautious when entering and exiting the holes (this is when predators like lizards can eat them!), so getting a photo had been extremely difficult. I’ve taken about 50 shots of an empty hole. Thank goodness for digital cameras!!!

Bees such as carpenter bees use pieces of dead wood for their nesting sites, so we leave a couple stumps laying around the yard for them. This photo is a male carpenter bee investigating a rookery hole.

We don’t even get upset when the leaf-cutter bees use leaves of the plants in our yard for their nests. Some people might consider that the bee makes their gardens less attractive, but, I feel exactly the opposite - knowing that the tree is there to help the bees raise their offspring…

To me, THAT is a beautiful thing!!

Providing water is another extremely important subsidy that benefits the pollinators in our yard. A bird-bath helps the birds, but we also provide a separate source for our insect friends - see, bees are actually very shy, because, as it turns out, lots of animals want to eat them. For example, many birds are ‘insectivores’, which means they eat bees. In the photo to the right, you can see two honey bees drinking water from our pond. Upon a bit of searching, I finally found where the honey bees drink water - they sneak down between the reedy vegetation, where few predators can see them. In fact, it was tough to get my point-and-shoot camera to focus on the bees, what with all the vegetation surrounding them!

Yes, people have fears of being stung, but, with a little awareness, we can easily live together peacefully!

Quail Diaries: This Year, Its Super Dad!

Welcome back to our ongoing stories of the California Quail (Callipepla californica) who live in our neighborhood! Last year, we got to meet Super Mom. Well, there's a new Super in the yard, and that is: Super Dad! One of the first families to hatch-out this year was a huge group of (we think we counted) 20 chicks. A week or so after we first spotted them, I began to notice that I didn't see an adult female.

Our first question was, "Did a predator (such as a neighbor's cat or dog, a Cooper's hawk, or even a bobcat) get her?"

That seemed unlikely because the babies were still all present and unharmed (as far as we could count - its not easy to get an accurate count! The quail babies move en masse, with a sort of "flow" that makes it hard to discern one baby from the other). Usually, a predator would target the babies, which are easier prey. This did not make the "predator theory" very plausible.

We decided that she must have become gravid again, and went to lay more eggs (with another male). We have many male quail in the yard, fighting daily over the females, so this explanation made the most sense.

Overall, Super Dad has done a GREAT job! He keeps the babies moving through the yard, a behavior that most likely prevents predators from reliably finding where the vulnerable babies may be. The babies themselves have adapted well, and form a tight-knit group that follows Dad when on the move, and lays together in a cohesive unit when he's allowing them to rest. The picture on the right is Super Dad assembling the babies in a safe group near the edge of tree cover, but still in the warm sun. As you can see in the photo to the left, the babies are quite content to just lay down, preen themselves, and wait for the next command to move.

And I'll leave you with my final picture: here he is!! Super Dad!!!

With the babes content in the sun, Dad gets the good perch, calls out some territorial "chucks" and watches over his chicks. What a guy! To hear examples of his territorial call, click on this link, and scroll down to the "male aggressive call". This is also the sound the males make when the fight over the females during mating season.

Meet the Neighbors - The Black-throated Sparrow

One of my favorite new additions to the yard is the black-throated sparrow (Amphispiza bilineata) (BTSP) (it has a lovely song, which you can hear through a link on the Cornell Bird site (linked above), or by clicking here and here. I prefer the second links because they capture more of the lyricism than the Cornell clips. These sparrows in particular are bold, curious, and vocal. They're a great addition to the yard, because they enjoy hanging out "where the action is", usually in a shrub nearby where I'm working in the yard, often making their high-pitched twinkling calls and songs.

Sounds like the sparrows' population is in decline, mostly linked to hotter-burning fires in the Great Basin region and habitat conversion, which is too bad. Here's a nice little essay about the loss of BTSP due to suburbanization.

The BTSP prefers habitats with mature cacti and enough vegetation to provide their seed-based diet (they also eat insects, esp during breeding and nestling season). It was a nice "compliment" to the yard to have the BTSP choose to call it his territory and decide to breed here.

Seems its not as easy as just showing up - in the three years that a BTSP has called the yard his territory (I assume its the same male, but we can never be sure unless we banded him), there have been only 2 years where a mate has shown up and they've bred. In fact, this year, I wasn't even sure if a female sparrow was in the yard (in this species, the male and female have the same plumage, which means that, unless you see two sparrows hanging out togther, you don't know you have more than one). Then, I was looking out the back door, and, lo - I saw it!! The baby black-throated sparrow!! The pic to the left is the first one I was able to snap of the chick. You can see that it still has that big-billed baby look. There is no black throat and the white eyebrow is just begining to form. The chick has the characteristic brown speckling that many baby birds have - great camo in the nest, in shrubs, and on the ground!

The pic on the right was taken just a couple days later. The chick has already developed the characteristic white eyebrows. The black throat won't appear until the winter molt. To the left is one of the babies (there ended up being 2 this year!) begging in a shrub. I heard the typical BTSP chirping; but this time it was particularly high pitched. Chasing down the sound, I found the baby perched within the safety of the many-branched creosote bush shrub, loudly begging for food. It would also flutter its wings rapidly. The pic isn't in focus - my cheap point-and-shoot camera couldn't focus very well with all the random branches. An example of why the baby uses the shrub for cover!

I sure hope this successfull nesting event means more black-throated sparrows in our yard many years into the future!

Quail Diaries: The Return of Lady Coop

She's back!! Yes, making a sooner-than expected visit to our yard was a top predator of our resident California quail (Callipepla californica) covies, a female Coopers hawk (Accipiter cooperii). Usually the coops are found in our town only in the cooler months of late fall, winter, and early spring. Otherwise, they live up in the higher elevations, within deciduous and coniferous forests. We very recently had a rare monsoon rainstorm; which brought a number of the mountain birds down to forage in our yard, including a brightly colored western tanager.

Hawks have what is know as reverse sexual dimorphism, where the female of the species is larger than the male. It is hypothesized that this has been an adaptation associated with diversification of feeding and prey-capturing. Females hunt for larger birds (such as mourning doves and quail) and males hunt for smaller prey (such as sparrows and larger songbirds). This means that it is usually the female coop who is a threat to the quail.

Coops are amazing hunters and are known for their comfort with running on the ground to pursue their prey. Here's another lady, last winter, who had chased some quail into the bushes (to the right). As you can see, she's looking into the bush, ready to chase. Don't worry, our little quail friends were safe!! (This time... actually, in the winter, the coopers hawk will hunt our yard up to 4 times a day!! I suspect its that often when her hunts are unsuccessful...) After I snapped the shot, the hubby (who was waiting for my Go) ran out and chased her away.
The presence of the Lady Coop strongly affects the covey behavior of the quail. Just before her arrival each fall, the quail have massed into one huge covey that wanders the neighborhood, relaxes in the shade, and call to one another across the acres. After a couple days of her incesent chasing, they break down into small, quiet groups that hug the shade, cautiously skurrying from shelter to shelter.
This was the first time that the juvenile quail who were born this season have met their most-feared predator... and they were definitely scared. I knew she was in the yard because I heard the adults make their alarm call for 30 minutes! See, I feel guilty now because I'm trying to learn the quail calls. There are many of them and some sound alike. The alarm call sounds oddly similar to the "lets eat" call... Took me a long time until I realized that something was up in teh yard. I look out the back door, and there she is, Lady Coop, just 20 feet from my face, waiting in a low branch for an unsuspecting victim to come eat the bird seed!!
Luckily, she was only present for a couple days this time. Then the summertime temps returned and Lady Coop must have high-tailed it back to the mountain! I wonder if she is one of our regular winter residents and knew exactly to come to our ash tree? I mean, she was perched 5 feet above the exact spot where we *always* throw out bird seed. How did she know that?
And, as a final parting shot, here's a picture of the super-family I mentioned before... As part of their daily wandering and circling through the yard, they regularly cross our "stream" (we dug the drainage, flood it with a hose, and planted native wetland vegetation). The quail moms especially love to take their chicks through the stream because the tall bunch grasses provide both cover and forage for her babies. Cute!

Turtle Time !!

A tortoise is a turtle, but a turtle is not always a tortoise... Okay. Now that we got that one over with!!!

[See, they're all turtles, but a tortoise is a turtle that is terrestrial. Turtles can be further defined as tortoise, "aquatic turtle" or "semi-aquatic turtle".] I always call them turtles because I prefer the sound of that word. It just rolls off the tongue better!

I've been amassing photos and movies of the tortoises, but in an effort to not take too too many photos (they are so cute in their odd way!), I don't have a lot of recent pix. Its never difficult, though, to get nice shots of turtles eating. They love eating! This spring, with all the nice native annual plants we saw this year, we were able to gather up a tasty buffet for our pet desert tortoises. Desert tortoises have been found to selectively prefer legume plants like the ones in these photos. Above, Megagodzilla is eating an Astragalus didymocarpus. To the right, Godzilla (left) is joined by Gamara. They're eating Astragalus and Lupinus bicolor. These leguminous plants are known for their nitrogen-fixing capabilities. This also benefits desert tortoises... when tortoises eat legumes, their bodies do not require as much water to metabolize the food. This is a great benefit for Mojave Desert tortoises, which experience rain only for very short times in the early spring.

And here we have Bruiser, one of our young African spur-thighed tortoises, looking very tortoisey... wouldn't you agree? Our four spur-thighs are now 5 years old, and just about to hit their growth-spurt age. They are a little larger than a grapefruit, but will grow to be over 100 pounds as adults!! (that'll be another couple decades, since they live to over 100 years old.) Next to Bruiser on the photo below is our runt, little Monster X. He even behaves like a runt - he's picky with his food, easily scared by the larger tortoises, and very very easily distracted. Usually I feed him separately from the others. Oh, by the way, these turtles are too young to know their gender, so I'm referring to them in the universal Him. In this photo, you can see the "spurs" on the thighs of Bruiser's back leg (the little horns). They protected the tortoise from predators when they lived amongst the mega fauna of Africa - lions and hyenas.

I'll leave you with a video I've called, "Tortoise Feeding Frenzy" As you can see in the movie, these tortoises live up to their names - Merciless Eating Machines. They nearly inhale their food! Spike, the final of the four to enter the movie, displays a funny turtle quality - linear movement. These tortoises seem to insist on moving forward in a strait line. If that means climbing over something... so be it... Seems like maladaptive behavior for something so clunky; but they've survived with this behavior (we believe) for hundreds of thousands of years, so it must benefit them somehow!! The video also shows little Monster X (aka Runtlinger) and his picky eating style and easy distract ability. He barely eats anything while the other tortoises inhale their greens.

Happenings In the Yard

We had a couple of warm days here - it got up to 106 F in the shade!! Came on pretty suddenly, and some of the critters were breathing hard (esp. some warblers, like the Townsend's warbler, which travel through our valley on their migrations, but live up in cooler temps in the summer). The cacti are in full bloom (some already past bloom), and I thought I'd share a couple of the ones with spectacular magenta blooms.

Got a nice shot of Super Mom with her chicks (her myth is explained in my last entry). If you look carefully, you can see how some are larger than others (story below). I've been watching her, to try and understand her "super" style... and I see that she's a real leader and a herder... she keeps the babes in line and moving along, as this photo is evidence. I can count 13 chicks in this photo, and I know more were hanging out to the side with pop.

And, with the warm weather, out come the desert iguanas (Dipsosaurus dorsalis), who are endemic to our yard. One of my favorite residents is Stumpy Joe, who can be identified by the fact that his long back toes are no longer present. He either lost them through fighting with other males (or females?) or from getting away from predators (road runners, gopher snakes, red racer snakes, etc.). As you can see, he's also re-growing the tip of his tail. What a scrapper! Joe could have been living in our yard for years... but we have so many iguanas now, its difficult to truly tell them apart (some - the babies and the gravid females - are easier to identify than others). Its only through his lost toes that I can tell him for who he is. And what a character! Truly a ruler of the yard. These photos are from when I came upon him as he was hanging out on the tallest mound in our yard - a real territory treasure. And he's the one who commands it. Stumpy is fun to feed meal worms (got a photo of the hubby feeding Joe last year posted on the blog) and he's always willing to run up to us and see if we've got a treat for him. I ran out of meal worms and fed him some creosote flowers instead. He enjoyed them... but they certainly aren't as exciting as meal worms! Here's another shot of Joe. How can you NOT love that face?

And to close us out, I'll give ya another photo of another nice cactus flower. Its a beauty!! The yellow is so brilliant, our semi-cheap digital camera just can't deal with it - that's a common problem when photographing cacti flowers. Those pink petals just freak the camera out! Maybe its time to learn the Program Mode of the darned thing.

Quail Diaries - The Legend of Super-Mom

Well, I'm a week late for the official "Mother's Day" holiday... but anyone who knows me is aware that I'm not very good with these dates... I wanted to write about our tortoises; but the quail have been so active, and I've gotten such great photos of them... we'll focus on Super Mom first. Yes, there she is to your left... Super Mom. As I had written in a previous entry, the California quail (Callipepla californica) that naturally occur in our yard are known for communal raising of their chicks - at times, a couple parents will join forces and raise their babies together. This greatly reduces predation, a big problem for both the babies and adults - quail are highly desired by the predators out there, and are constantly wary.
The quail in our yard seem to be "figuring out" this technique, and, for some reason, this mom has ended up with the babies from three (3!) families! She's got about 18 chicks following her (impossible to get a real count on 'em) and she and the dad have been leading these babies through our yard for the past couple weeks. I don't know how she ended up with all of them... somehow they imprinted on her and her chicks, not their own mom. If you look carefully at the photo here, you can see that some chicks are almost twice the size as others. Its a little tough to see; but its there... We hope momma can handle the responsibility... We hope some mommas start helping (there's a family that lost their babies to her, and are walking around with a single baby chick... why they don't pair up with Super Mom, I'm not sure...

Here's another fun photo of a different mom with her chicks (we've got about 3 or 4 families in the yard right now, never mind the counting mess that Super Mom has created). I opened up the back window-door shade at 6 this morn, and saw this very plumpy female resting in the yard. Look closely, and you'll see all her chicks scrunched in, trying to stay warm under her feathers. Cute!!! The quail used to be very difficult for me to photograph. They were scared of the camera lens (the Big Eye)... but each successive generation has adjusted and habituated, so that this mom allowed me to snap several shots.

And finally, lazy days and resting babies!! Here are 3 chicks from

Super Mom, resting in the sun. They love to lay down on their sides and stretch out their massively big feet.